Thanks for the introduction, Green Bean! For those who don't know me, I'm Lori from Life in Webster Groves, and I live with my husband in a small suburb just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. I'm a native Northwesterner, an architect by profession, a gardener, an avid soccer fan, and a dog-mom, to name a few characteristics, and I'm excited to be your friendly neighborhood APLS coordinator for the Lower Midwest. For now, the Lower Midwest will cover Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Kentucky. I would also love to hear from those from Southern Illinois who are so inclined, since the climate may be a bit more comparable to the Lower Midwest than the Great Lakes.As Green Bean suggested, I'm looking for quite a few partners in crime that are willing to share success stories, listen to each other's frustrations or failures, swap recipes and gardening tips, and/or just generally serve as a support group for sustainable living. If we find we live close enough together we can arrange to borrow tools, swap produce, hit an occasional political rally or protest together, or meet for coffee sometime. I'm thinking that the breadth and diversity in this region, and the widely varying climatic shifts we tend to see should make our group discussions very interesting! I'll be taking suggestions pretty much from day one, and I expect this to be a very interactive process. So if you're interested in joining me in the Lower Midwest region, please comment on this post and let me know. If you'd rather join via email, you can do that ltepler (at) gmail (dot) com. And if you'd like to help me with the coordination efforts, you can let me know that too. Your help would be greatly appreciated.
For those with blogs, please go ahead and grab the logo and insert it into your own page. If you're a relative newbie like me, this is a fairly simple process. Just right click on the logo, hit Save As to save it to your own computer, and add it as a picture with a link back to this page. Feel free to email me if you need step-by-step instructions.
I have to say that I'm a bit swamped with a work deadline right now, but I hope to post my very first regional post in about a week. In the meantime, I'll be adding our lovely logo on the sidebar with a link to a (hopefully) growing member list, much like you see already in place for the Great Lakes. If you have any questions or comments, or just want to chat about what it means to be an APLS in the Lower Midwest, please contact me via email. You can also see what I'm up to by visiting my blog.
I'm definitely looking forward to meeting you all, virtually or otherwise!
- Lori
PS: If you are on facebook and haven't yet joined the APLS group, you can find it here. It's just another forum for discussing sustainability and what it means in our daily lives.
